


Eli's Keys

by rorywritesstuff



Category: Original Work
Genre: Employment, Friends With Benefits, Japan, Jobs, Letters, Living abroad, M/M, POV First Person, being taken advantage of, keys, spare keys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 04:01:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8356270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rorywritesstuff/pseuds/rorywritesstuff
Summary: A new crime wave spurns a man living abroad to consider exactly what he considers important just before he begins to pack up his life to leave.





	

On Tuesday, Eli texts me to ask me to put a sticker over the number at the top of my key to his flat. Apparently, some people ('sickos', Eli calls them) have been taking pictures of the numbers at the top of people's keys, getting copies made and then waiting in their flats for them. I text him back that of course I'll do it, promptly forget and then go back to whatever I was doing, which was nothing.  
I'm not completely heartless, but I find the idea of Eli coming home to someone unexpected in his flat really, really funny. I can't help but picture him offering them a cup of tea. I also can't quite imagine what a nefarious criminal would want with Eli- I can get someone breaking in and nicking his stuff, sure, but why would they hang around afterwards? What would be the purpose of staying? With the best will in the world, he doesn't exactly exude sex appeal and I say that as someone who's sleeping with him.  
I do nothing until twelve thirty, when it's time for lunch; I eat for fifteen minutes and then go back to doing nothing. This sounds like I am down on my work, which is absolutely not true. That I have found a job which pays me enough to live while expecting basically no action in return is, I think, the towering acheivement of my adult life. Too bad I have to give it up in a year.  
Around two, I make a coffee, and at three the head comes out of his office to survey that which he rules, so I deftly crack open a textbook and look like I'm making notes. I don't think anyone's fooled by this; I'm not so arrogant as to assume everyone else is an idiot (Eli would say I'm just so arrogant). However, the theatre is important: I pretend I'm working, so they don't have to confront me about me blatantly not working and the world keeps turning. The head doesn't actually pay my wages, that's the Board of Education, so he's not even really making a loss. And sometimes they need something heavy lifted, and then I come in handy and they've saved the cost of a day labourer.  
I leave, as ever, at four, and say "Sayounara" to anyone who happens to be in the staffroom at that time. At training, years ago, they taught me how to say "Sorry to be the first to leave" and I said it every day for the first couple of weeks but whenever I did, I kept thinking of what Mrs. Mutton, my old PE teacher, used to tell me: "Sorry is an action." I clearly wasn't sorry to be leaving first, as I kept doing it, and I had no intention of changing that, so instead I just started saying "Sayounara." No one noticed the difference. 

I'm home by quarter to five and almost immediately I hop in the shower. I don't pay for water here- that's the blessed BOE again- so I bathe quite frequently. That makes it sound like I didn't bathe when I paid for my own utilities, which was never really the case (maybe for a year during uni) but now I'm almost compulsive about it. Whenever I'm going to Eli's, or Julian's coming over, or I'm about to go to school, or I've just come back from school, or I'm going out to see my mates or I'm just plain bored, I take a shower. This means that I am, I think, the best smelling man I know. And Julian uses cologne.  
When I get out the shower, Eli has texted me, asking me about the sticker on the key. I roll my eyes, stalk over to a drawer in my desk, rattle it open and extract a sheet of stickers that, once upon a time, I had expected to hand out to the students, back when I thought I might actually be teaching.  
I look at the sheet- rows and rows of obnoxious, obsequiously cute animals. I search and select the one that best suits Eli, a hedgehog that looks about two minutes away from choking on its own cheek pouches. (Years ago, back before I first started fucking him, Anna and I used to call Eli 'Voley', after the character from Wind in the Willows; I still sometimes call him this in my letters to her.)  
I peel off the little hedgehog and layer it over the number on the top of the key. It stares out at tme, and I notice that the corners of its mouth are downturned. I look at the other stickers- big, cheesy, Emoji-esque grins, the lot of them, but this little critter has the looks of someone about to end it all at Brighton Pier. Eli indeed.  
I take a photo of the key bedecked with its new ornamentation and send it to him. Twenty three seconds later he texts back with a smiley face. I don't deign to respond.  
Instead, I try and get a hold of Julian. This goes as well as expected and after I take another shower. It's now five thirty and I don't like to waste my evenings- I already spend my days doing nothing. I owe Anna a reply; her last letter arrived a fortnight ago and I still haven't written a word in reply. Eli has suggested, more than once, as is his way, that I could write some kind of response at work and to this I just give him my most withering of looks. If I start doing productive things at work, they'll wonder why I'm not doing productive things for them. The delicate balance will be upset.  
I throw a few things (some pens, a cup, a stuffed toy that Julian got me for my birthday) from my desk onto my bed, and then sit down to write. For some reason I can't remember, Anna and I decided to write to each other only handwritten letters. I know I could bang this thing out in half an hour if I could just use my laptop but then I could also just send her an email and have the whole thing over in five minutes, but then the mystique would be gone. I tear some pages out of the notebook that I bought just to write to her and begin:  
_Dear Anna,_  
_Sorry this has taken me so long- I'd make an excuse about being busy but you not only know exactly what I do but also exactly how much time it takes up, so I won't insult your intelligence. Suffice to say, I imagine you expect this from me now._  
_Life in Japan continues much as it ever did- apparently there's been a spate of...well, not break-ins, because the criminals don't actually break anything, but people have been coming into other people's houses uninvited and that just isn't done. Voley's terribly worried that someone will sneak into his little den while he's away and give him a nasty shock, he's so scared that_  
I stop. Anna doesn't know that Eli and I are sleeping together; I was going to onto explain about the key and the sad little suicidal hedgehog but then I realise that it will be hard to explain why I have the key in the first place. I decide to turn it into a cruel joke (at Eli's expense, of course).  
_he's so scared that he's asked to start sleeping in my room. I told him I'd just put down rat traps and was scared he might get caught._  
Not great, but I imagine it will make Anna smile.  
_I'm fine, but I'm beginning to feel the burn of encroaching unemployment- I know I need to start working on my CV again soon, but I'm intimidated by the amount of touching up required....well, no, I really only have to add one line, but that seems so pathetic for five years._  
I consider going to say how scared I am of getting a reccommendation from this job, seeing as my duties have amounted to moving the lockers and serving as umpire on Sports Day, but I try and keep serious stuff out of my letters to Anna. This is partly because I want to seem more together than I am; partly because these letters are meant to be fun, otherwise why bother doing them; partly because I know that Anna's life is far, far worse than mine and if we start genuinely discussing life in these correspondences then I will be by far the worse off for it. I'm willing to keep my shit to myself if it means I don't have to deal with hers.  
_My mum keeps on threatening to visit- I'd just flat out tell her no, but she's the only only one who can bring me cheerios, so I must endure. I don't know what she's expecting to do while she's here, but I think she realises this is her last chance to visit Japan. I mean, obviously, she could just go on her own when I'm not here but then who would she_  
I stop again. I was going to write something to the effect of my mother being a harridan and, although that's perfectly true, I don't really wish to commit it to writing. I have no problem throwing Eli under the bus for Anna's amusement; I draw the line at mum.  
_but then who would she stay with? A proper Englishwoman never travels alone._  
Anna will eat this up. She's a true anglophile and has been ecstatic about the possibility of my return from Japan if only because she can finally visit. A nod to old-world English etiquette will help to distract her from the obvious change in sentiment halfway through the line.  
_What else to say?_  
I'm trying to fill space now and she'll know it. Oh, well.  
_Julian_  
I cross out the name. Then I double cross it out. Then I scribble all over it until the pen breaks through the paper a little. She cannot see that name. I mustn't write about Julian.  
No serious shit.


End file.
